I'm still waiting for one of the main browsers for the Mac to stabilize. Safari is mostly ok, but periodically gets into a confused state - this morning, my wife's Mac stopped being able to deal with Javascript. It was enabled, but wouldn't work until we killed the application and restarted. Very odd.

I had switched to Firefox, but I switched back - it seems very unstable on the Mac, locking up for no good reason more than once per day. On Windows, Firefox is a pig (the developers really, really need to use a decent GC), but it seems mostly stable. On the Mac - not so much.

So I switch back and forth, waiting for stability...

Scoble is giving IE 7 a whirl:

But IE7 does have some challenges ahead of it. Some sites in it render very slow. Most notably for me, Google Reader. I’m also using the new Firefox 2 and Firefox is a LOT faster. IE7 is frustratingly slow on Google Reader. It seems to hang whenever new stuff is being downloaded in the background via AJAX. To be fair, Google is probably pushing the browser in all sorts of ways, even the MSN team decided to back off on its use of AJAX due to speed problems, though (Live.com used to have an infinite scroll capability, which I really loved but they got rid of it after speed complaints came in).

I can't speak to this directly; I haven't grabbed IE 7 yet. What worries me about IE 7 has to do with the internal websites here at Cincom. When I tried one of the betas, it simply didn't work with our main intranet site. It may well be fine now, but I'm a bit leery.

Technorati Tags: IE7, Firefox

I just got bitten by a browser incompatibility I didn't know about - IE doesn't do "onclick" handlers in menus. Since I just changed over to that, it's kind of a problem. So, I now detect the browser agent and feed IE 6 the older (long) lists. Sorry about the break.

Technorati Tags: blog

Via Joel Spolsky, I ran across the coolest Firefox extension:

IETab takes advantage of the fact that Internet Explorer is available as an ActiveX control, which is available to be embedded in any Windows application, to open certain websites in Firefox using Internet Explorer. Whenever a website comes up complaining that you need to get "Netscape 4.0 or some other modern browser" you can just right click on the tab and it'll pop up right in Firefox being rendered by Internet Explorer. You can set up a list of websites that always come up in IE tabs

There are screenshots of the settings screen over at Joel's; you can list websites that will always use the IE control. This lets you route around the damage of people who think that IE specific websites are ok (like, for instance, the folks here at Cincom who maintain the internal websites. Sigh). Runs in its own tab, which is very nice.

Technorati Tags: web, firefox, IE

Cyrus doesn't much care for tabs in browsers:

Ok, i seriously don't get tabs on Windows.  Hell, i don't get tabs on OSX either.  In the latter there's a great system called Exposé for that, and in the former the task bar does the job just great.  Once i start using tabs though things go all to hell.  On OSX i can't tell which FireFox/Safari window has the tab i want (since it's too small), and similarly in windows i find myself scanning the taskbar for a site i was looking at, but i can't find it because the task bar entry only lists the site that is the currently active tab.  This makes it so difficult to actually find the site i want and it ends up being far slower than just having a window available for each site.

Umm - maybe there's a way to change the default, but - On Windows XP SP2, if I have more than one IE window open, I don't get any useful information at all from the taskbar at the bottom of the screen - it shows the not so helpful tooltip "Internet Explorer (2)". I fail to see how this is better than tabs - heck, it's worse, IMHO. Is there something I'm missing here?

Sam Gentile points to some Firefox configuration tips. They definitely improved things here.

The ArcterJournal lets slip a great rant on the current state of IE, and where that leaves developers:

Lets be honest here. There won't be any new updates to IE for a very long time will there? It's been said so many times, the IE renderer supports a billion languages, versions, and testing it in the wiz-bang microsoft test facility takes years for a single change. Are the changes required to give proper standards support coming anytime soon? I really doubt it, and that makes me sad, because it causes more work for me, the people I work with, and makes our products not nearly as good as they could be. Hell, even saying "support only IE" won't work because writing code for IE 6 (windows) still varies greatly compared to IE 5.X (latest on OS/9 and OS/X). You guys almost did us a favor by not supporting IE on the Mac anymore, which would have meant we could write for IE6/Mozilla, which would have been a bit easier, but later reversed the decision and re-supported IE 5 on the Mac.

So I ask again, how is the IE team working to make sure their browser is the best?

There's also that helpful way they decided to stop supporting the old Netscape plugin API, and instead decided to invent a new Active/X based scheme - breaking a bunch of code and lowering security in one fell swoop. Sigh...

Every so often, Scoble posts about IE, or asks for comments on it. Well, I've got one. With the help of a colleague, I've got a nice looking site now thanks to CSS. We have had a few issues though, and have had to add some ugly hacks specific to IE - because the IE team refuses to do a compliant CSS implementation. Come on guys - are you telling me that the mighty MS can't keep up with the guys doing Opera, or Mozilla? I'd really, really like it if MS acted responsibly about this. Most people use IE, because way back when - when IE 4 and NS 4 were battling - IE was better. Enough resting on your laurels - get the heck back to work!